Majutsu-Shi No Chiara

Majutsu-shi no Chikara loosely translates to "Sorcerer's Power"

CHAPTER SIX: Doom of the Sidero

Light filtered through the cracks in the wall... stiff, brittle, unfired clay left too long in the sun... perhaps as thick as a finger... but the clay was all wrong... filled with rotting and disease, a smell like waking-up in piss and nightmares from the furthest corners of the fiery pits of the damned... and it

clung

to him like it needed him... like he'd drowned in a cesspit and dragged to shore only to cure in the sun and be left for dead.

Only, he didn't feel dead... no matter how much his nose wished the contrary.

He felt warm. Hungry. Thirsty like nothing else.

He felt itchy. Anxious. Stuck.

He felt stuck.

In dried shit.

Only

worse

.

And he couldn't throw up, because the stuff was covering... it was in his mouth.

Gods be merciful, it was in his

mouth

!

Pushing and pulling, kicking and punching, he flailed free in a sound like breaking pottery and exploding coals from a campfire. Chunks of the crust flaked, crumbled, and cracked like stained glass... letting ash and stink waft into his nostrils as he gagged and fought the lump of excrement from his mouth. Dry-heaving, he scrubbed his tongue roughly over his teeth, blind in the late-morning sun. Nary a lick of spittle, though he wished it, would issue forth to give any relief from that wretched taste. Crumbs...

crumbs

of it rolled between his teeth and he coughed... gagged and heaved again, unable to expel the stuff fast enough.

Then, he heard sounds everywhere.

He was surrounded.

Undead leaping from their earthen crypts...

No.

Orks.

An ambush?

The skirts of some memory juked behind a corner as he reached for it, leaving only a tattered rag of an impression... fever... sickness... warm breath...

"Where...?" the word didn't even fit right in his mouth, so dry and stiff was his tongue. Feeling like he'd cut himself with his own teeth, he stood up, stamping, slapping, shaking the dust off himself... and promptly collapsed on numb legs tingling with knife-like certainty that he'd been stuck there... a while.

Cursing, barking, coughing, retching -- cracking plates, the drumming of scattering logs or bricks, and bodies began moving very close to him. He shielded his eyes, the sun beating down, and the shadows that towered over him made furious ork-speech at each other... at him... somebody kicked him... harder than he deserved, he thought, but not so hard as to injure more than his already-wounded pride, in that moment. More an exploratory testing of his flesh with a bare foot, heavy and calloused though it be.

"You live?" the voice was familiar, not friendly... not unknown, not beloved...

"Abhilash?" he shielded his eyes and looked up, the name scraping its way through his lips.

She was shining. Furious. Confused. Impossible to see clearly through the nimbus of red-gold sunlight pouring across her shoulders and directly at his eyes.

A dozen voices all started shouting at once, but he heard (or thought he heard) the ork female say something about drinking fire... before she determinedly stomped away with wobbly knees toward... the water tent?

Kamakshi he recognized immediately, as it was her voice that croaked a song in orkish that brought the other ork voices to relative quiet. He knew it was her way of working magic on them... he'd seen it before, hadn't he?

Who was he?

"Damon."

Right.

Kamakshi's voice, wrinkled and rankled from the disgusting filth they'd all evidently suffered, was none-the-less tinged with a noticeable amount of awe... or was it fear? Did orks fear things?

"I do." he nodded, to which Kamakshi tilted her head and a curious eyebrow at him.

"I... do?" Damon tried again, then realized that Abhilash was the one that had asked if he lived.

"Oh..." he shook his head, once again unable to work up enough spittle to wrest any of the shit-stinking taste (gods above and below, it was

bad

) out of his mouth. "No... I mean, yes, I'm alive and I am Damon."

"What have you done?" Kamakshi's voice was very soft.

That's definitely fear.

Damon decided, looking around.

He was laying on scorched, shit-covered fur blankets surrounded by timber walls on a low stone foundation... he thought it an odd conclave to have two mighty doors and no proper roof... only, he saw moorings for beams, burned-away stubs of hempen rope where lashings had once been...

Oh...

his mouth made the shape of the sound he was thinking, memory of the heavy plank and thatch roof rising up from a murky pool. Whatever had happened... scorch marks covered the floor, the furs, the walls... like the interior had been blanched in a smith's furnace, and the roof caught and burned to cinder.

"Drink." Abhilash's voice was still sour, but he didn't think she was quite

angry

.

Maybe.

As he tried to take a sip from the waterskin she was offering, Abhilash squeezed the drinking bladder and flooded his mouth with stinging spirits. He choked, gagged, and spluttered -- the burning liquid searing through his nostrils and making his eyes water as best they could under the circumstances. Some of the alcohol he swallowed and very much desired to reverse that decision; he thought better of it when he realized it meant tasting that putrescence

again

.

"Thank you." he wheezed, when at last he could draw reluctant breath.

Abhilash grunted, her eyes narrowed at him and brow furrowed.

"Are you hurt?" he asked, seeing human-like twitching in her jaw and at the corners of her eyes.

"Shut up." Abhilash stood and addressed her mother... in orkish.

"Yeah, I didn't want to know." Damon looked about, eyes still squinting against the light, arms cocked back to prop himself up as he looked over the brood of Kamakshi.

He shielded his eyes again from the sun, but it didn't help. He looked at the ground, but the light radiating from his legs was too bright... maybe if he looked...

"WHAT?!" he leapt backward, flopping about as he scrambled away from his legs, seeing the light shining on his stomach, his arms. "What the fucking...what's... what's happening to me?!"

...

Kamakshi laughed. She savored Damon's discomfort, for it was the last spiteful thing she could enjoy of South-wold's children. When she had seen the light begin to shine from within him, she knew it was the end... it had consumed everything... at least, that's what it was

supposed

to do. She had recognized the killing intent of the explosion as it was happening, far too late to stop it. All the same, she had thought they were all dead. Until they weren't. Until she woke, dazed and covered in a thick, burnt crust of unknowable filth so vile and revolting that she

still

couldn't find the right words to describe it... in any language she knew. Until, after freeing herself and seeing the wreckage of her yurt and the state of her tribe, she concluded that something had gone

other

than intended. Until she had seen Damon, glowing with magical light from every fiber of his being, had startled himself and slammed into a wall in his flight away from his own power. Flopping, a fish caught out of the stream to gasp and bounce on the sand -- tumbling over itself in delicious parody of its former glory... only to be smothered by the thin air above-water.

Backed against a wall, panting like a frightened animal in a trap, he radiated a light that made Kamakshi feel... unusual. She wanted to touch him... to breathe in his smell (a poor decision, given recent detritus they seemed to share)... she wanted him to

look

at her.

"The nymph's magic." Kamakshi murmured to herself, still grinning in amusement at Damon's terror and confusion.

All through the camp, orks shed the fetid carapaces in which they'd been cocooned, emerging... different. Kamakshi saw these changes in bold relief against memories of hundreds of moons -- rearing most all of these orks from whelps, though all but her daughters were great-grandchildren and further down in lineage... all tangled about the central stalk of the bloodline of Sidero.

They shone with orkish perfection. Nothing so luminous as the radiance given-off by Damon's own flesh, there was an unusually healthy hue to each and every one. Muscles and skin, bones, joints...

aligned

in ways pitiably absent scant hours before. Some of the mules were muttering of the aches in their bodies -- beyond the suffocating, hardened spume now scattered and being trampled for sport by the mules -- and they gaped their mouths at their surfeit of injuries...

For they were not injuries. Where a mule once had been malformed, bent, twisted, uneven, or grotesque... now, there was even-ness, symmetry, smoothness of limb and straightness of jaw and spine... before, these inbred orks had been the dregs, the last and least of orkish caste...

Now, they were

wondrously

...

gloriously

...

divinely

made whole.

Kamakshi's eyes turned to her daughters, where the differences in their appearance were far more subtle -- they were very nearly full-blooded orks... but that, as daughters of Sidero, they were as much Kamakshi's sisters as her daughters.

Her tongue cried out, her mouth pained it could not salivate in honest hunger and approval of the accumulated ork flesh all around her.

"Abhilash." Kamakshi's voice was a whisper that struck a deafening boom within the camp -- the only thing louder was the gentle rasping of grit against the side of a tent as the wind stirred lazily... the pop of canvas as a flap fell to cover an entryway...

"I am here." Abhilash stood, naked and bearing the dribbling wineskin no more than two paces distant.

"Bring him..." Kamakshi stepped forward, feeling the weight of years crunching beneath her feet and falling in the putrid sand of her chrysalis.

She wasn't sure where she should go... her first thought had been to the bathing pond -- but that place had been where Damon had sought to drown himself, and the notion wrinkled her nose with distaste.

At the water tent, she made inspection of the jars and barrels within. Snapping the neck from a bottle of sour wine, she rinsed the acrid vinegar through her teeth and spat it to the dust of the ground. Far better than what had been... yet she craved cleanliness... washing away the vestiges of what must have been her former life...

A clay jug of water served to flush her mouth and nose, and she gave a satisfied gushing of sputum from her throat -- blowing clear first her right nostril, then her left... and she offered the remainder of the jug to Abhilash, waving her hand toward the rest of the containers and giving her daughters instruction.

"Better to wash this foulness away."

And she was looking up, out, north toward the forest the humans called Willow Wood. There, she knew, were springs. One ran from near the forest's heart north and east, north and west, and west, snaking its path out to the borders of South-wold and north and west to Renks Cairn, and west to the sea she knew not how far...

Another cut south and west, the heart of the forest a hill that blocked the smaller of the springs from racing north and west to the coast, before turning a slow, thoughtful loop west and longingly north before a broad wetland swallowed it -- a half a tenday's trek from the sea. The Sidero could be there, in the narrow elbow of the smaller creek, before mid-afternoon. The water would be cold, cleansing... sweet and free of the foulness that plagued her -- plagued all of the Sidero.

"The small creek, that way." Kamakshi pointed, her voice a hush that wrapped around her children, even as they made guttural, spluttering sounds and gagged forth slimy resin where their shells had mixed with water.

"You want to drag the human to more water?" Abhilash barked, half dark humor, half annoyance.

"Carry him." Kamakshi looked her daughter in the eyes, seeing a naked anger standing wide upon her face... but the Shaman-Chief of Sidero smiled at her, without anger or threat of violence.

The strangeness of Kamakshi's mouth, curling up around her delicate-looking tusks, gave Abhilash no small measure of confusion. The black-brown lips full and damp, as gleaming, straight teeth shone between them. Abhilash became aware of the transformation of the Sidero, seeing it now in her mother's flesh, then in her sisters'... the mules might have been orks of a different tribe, for the changes she saw in them.

"It is time." Kamakshi's smile filled Abhilash's breast with a fluttering warmth. A curious sensation, not unlike -- and yet not like -- the anticipation of blood-letting and violence, the breath-catching, heart-pounding

want

of her seed-right... her birthright...

"Time to carry him?" Abhilash frowned, but found that her mouth did not want to -- instead making a pained effort to mimic her mother's smile.

"To claim seed-right, and celebrate our rebirth, my daughter." - these words were in human speech, for Kamakshi hoped to see Damon's reaction to such a proposition. Her smile did not wane, though it was easy to see that he had not heard her.

He was busy panting his terror, eyes still fixed on his flesh. He scant seemed to notice the smooth, muscled arms of Abhilash lofting him up and slinging him across her shoulder. Blood rushed to his head and his breath became shallow as the ork's shoulder crushed against his belly. The jostling, bouncing gait she used only made matters worse.

Why?

The word whined in his head, even as his breath pushed from his throat in pained grunts.

...

When Abhilash had scooped him up from the floor of the yurt, she had not seemed to notice that he was glowing -- didn't seem to care that the whole of the Sidero camp was tinted orange and gold, motes or fireflies floating around, taking-off or landing on orks, winking in and out of existence -- and her stony grip matched the cultivated sneer of her lip and slant of her eyes at him.

Lifted to his feet, Damon stumbled to follow her -- tugged coarsely by the arm toward the water tent. There, he was treated to a symphony of orks irrigating their nostrils and spewing water in all directions -- which did nothing to ease the churning of his stomach when the stink of these new rivers mixed with the already mind-dulling odor he'd so desperately tried to ignore.

Then, she'd slung him like a butchered calf on her shoulders -- and how he'd longed for the bliss of his earlier unconsciousness. The pain kept him awake. A far cry from being strangled, but roundly unpleasant, his stomach danced and clenched... his earlier decision to not expel the noxious brew that Abhilash had shoved in his gullet was now vetoed, his mouth and nose giving voice to their objection of this reversal to no effect that would sway his abused gut. Ichor... black slime...

It was with a last fit of reflex that his back and neck gave spasm, arcing the line of vitriol away from his ill-fitted chariot... perhaps for no other reason than: had he vomited down her back, he would have been that much closer to the smell. At least this way, they left much of it in their wake.

He clung to that for comfort, as no amount of orkish lumbering could free him from the remnants still coating his mouth and nose.

Sometime later, though it felt like the sun hadn't moved in months, his stomach decided to give a second and third attempt to escape his mouth through its own violence... he managed to dribble and heave only traces, with many a

hurk

sound and something like

ghakk

.

When dizziness gave him reason to think he might swoon, the lurching stopped. The

boom-boom

rush of his blood in his ears quickly began to ease and he found himself standing firmly on his own two feet again... only to pitch sideways, as the damned limbs had been rendered numb once more in that time.

...

"He's like a newborn whelp." Abhilash growled with no small disgust.

"Do you not see the magic he has wrought?" Kamakshi gestured around, her arms wide and sweeping. "Do you not see? See your brethren... see

me

...look at what his magic has changed."

"So." Abhilash gave petulant refusal to the evidence of her own eyes, and the rising desire in her blood... the wetness, however slight, of her pussy.

The whole of the field through which the stream cut lazily from the Willow Wood became quickly trampled by ork feet, with splashing, shouting, laughter, and a fair few vigorous swearings to boot. Long stalks of grass, barely green shoots that had dared to risk a late frost, became the matting of this sudden staging ground. At Kamakshi's direction, the Sidero scattered through the grass and dunked themselves (and each other) by ones and twos in the narrow stream.

Had they rushed in, as surely they wanted, with childlike abandon in their haste to wash away that cloying dust -- the stream would have surged over its banks and become a swampy, muddy mess... and the thought of that did not please Kamakshi greatly.

As her beautiful, perfect, flawless

mules

... how curious a thing to see such flesh on a poor, sterile creature... made themselves clean, they gradually prepared this temporary campsite. Their numbers grew swiftly enough that, by late afternoon, Kamakshi and her daughters looked upon a prepared space with no small hunger to enjoy it.

Kamakshi sent Inkar, Nahia, and Thato ahead of Muna, Uduak, and Abhilash. It became clear, then, to all six, that their Chief-mother's mind was driven, purposeful, in a way they found familiar... but her manner was still that of one smitten by magic. Subtle, dangerous glances found knowing eyes, and tensing muscles of neck or jaw signaled silent, secret understanding.

"So, you have repaid my gift, human." Kamakshi whispered to him, as Damon struggled to his feet and eyed the stream with desperation. Her words confused him, and he dragged his gaze away from the glittering water... the water that sparkled with purity, promise, and outlined naked ork flesh in every direction he looked. As with anything, his cock had taken to watching events unfold heedless of his brain's grasp of the situation, and it was Kamakshi's voice that made him once again aware of the abundance of flesh... and his own vulnerability.

"I don't know what you're talking about." Damon didn't shake his head in denial, but the left side of his neck twitched. His body had given the motion thought, considered the amount of fetid dust that might be shook loose, and chose to arrest all other movement until he was immersed in water... or on fire.

"Your dancing, earlier, tells me that you can

see

what has happened, plain enough." Kamakshi's voice was low, secretive... playful. His pulse quickened, and his dick tilted up to hear her better. Her silvery eyes didn't move -- locked to his own gaze, the brazen predator stalking.

"I know you see it, and you

saw

the magic pouring out of you." Kamakshi gestured at him, and he knew she meant the strange light... the light that had vanished sometime between the Sidero camp and this stream-side clearing the Sidero were making. A handful of orks were weaving-together mats of grass, and another two handfuls of orks were bounding away toward the forest.

Damon nodded dumbly, uncertain of what, if anything, he

could

say. His nose protested, wrinkling and drawing a sticky, wet sneeze that splattered more... gunk... into his hands. The wave of nausea was immediate, and he reeled drunkenly with the force of it. Kamakshi laid a steadying hand on his shoulder and locked eyes with him again.

"I do not know

how

you have done this, human." Kamakshi pursed her lips, which drew them tight across her tusks and made the protruding fangs appear all the larger for it. "I think I do not

care

... but I shall honor this gift, for it

is

a gift, Damon."